“We’re in a fight not because our opponents think we’re destined to lose the election. But because they fear we can win. And between now and the election they are going to use every tactic to try to destabilise, distract us and throw us off course. Our task, the task for every person in this party, is simple: To focus our eyes on the prize of changing this country.” Ed Miliband.

Ed Miliband has pledged to take on “vested interests” and “powerful forces” in his bid to win the next general election. Not even the Crosby and Murdoch-orchestrated media campaign, which was aimed at demoralising, undermining and monstering Ed Miliband can disguise the fact that the Tories are in a state of panic.

In fact the media campaign, aimed at attempting to undermine Miliband’s credibility as a leader, arose precisely because Miliband is the biggest threat to the UK power base and status quo that we’ve seen for many decades. He’s challenging the neo-liberal consensus of the past 30 years – now that is a plain indication of strong leader, and someone with personal strength and courage.

As for the media, and the attempt at agenda-setting, well we’ve known for the past four years that there is now a big chasm between what is real, and what is deemed “newsworthy”. Because the mainstream media have no interest in public interests, only vested ones. It’s about time that we reclaimed our democracy and showed them that WE set the agenda, not overpaid and highly corrupted journalists and editors. Or monopolies like the wake of scandals that is News Corp.

In his inspiring speech at the University of London, Ed Miliband said he would tackle a “zero-zero economy”, saying people were on so-called zero-hours contracts while the rich “get away with zero tax”. He talked about the Labour policy to defend our NHS – currently being fragmented by a privatisation programme that no-one voted for – which was particularly welcome, funded by a clampdown on tax avoidance and taxing hedge funds and cigarette companies.

He said he would “I am willing to put up with whatever is thrown at me in order to fight for you.”, and that it was the party’s “duty… not to shrink from the fight, not to buckle under the pressure but to win”.

This is a very strong indication of a very strong leader, who won’t be threatened or intimidated by Crosby’s dog-whistle, negative smear campaigning tactics. Miliband has indicated quite plainly that he intends to return to the “true soul” of the Labour Party, his frequent use of the inclusive word “together” putting social solidarity back on the agenda, and heralding a new politics of social and economic democracy. Miliband is about a politics where no-one is abandoned.

Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said there had not been a “shred of truth” in a newspaper story linking him with a leadership plot, calling it “pure fiction”.

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, he said Mr Miliband had shown “courageous leadership” in the face of attacks from “vested interests” who did not want Labour to win.

He added: “There has been a campaign in the last few days to destabilise and demoralise us.

My message today is that it won’t work, in fact it is going to galvanise us.”

And it has.

Miliband said Labour would talk about immigration: “but always on the basis of Labour values, not Ukip values.” He added: “We know that the deep discontent with the country gives rise to those who suggest false solutions. But unlike the Tories, what we will never do is try to out-Ukip Ukip.” I found this particularly reassuring, as a consistent reflection of traditional Labour inclusion, equality and diversity principles.

Miliband certainly has the fight and belief in what is right to get into Downing Street, he is  “driven by how we must change the country. That is why I am in this job, that is why it matters to me, that is what drives me on.” Quite properly so.

He said he wants to be prime minister because the country was “deeply unequal, deeply unfair, deeply unjust”.

This inequality is not some accident. It is driven by beliefs about how you run countries and how we should run Britain,” he said.

Wrong beliefs.

The belief that insecurity is the way you make working people work harder.

[I swear Mr Miliband could have written Conservatism in a nutshell!] 

The view that low pay is the only way we can compete in the world.

The idea that markets will always get the right outcome, even if that means powerful interests have all the power.

The notion that we cannot afford decent public services when money is tight.

And above all, the most mistaken view of all, that the success of the country depends just on a few at the top.

And when they do well, everyone in Britain does well.

These are the failed ideas of the past.

Beliefs that have had their time.”

This isn’t the speech of a “career politician”: it’s the speech of a partisan, conviction politician, Miliband is precisely the prime minister that this country so desperately needs.

Meanwhile, Nick Clegg has ignored official rebukes from the OBR and ONS for telling lies, and has taken to the same tired old lying again, claiming that the previous Labour government “left the economy in a mess”. A remarkable comment from a deputy prime minister, who’s government have borrowed more in 4 years than the last Labour government borrowed in 13,  and whose “Economic Plan” has depressed real wages for the past 4 years, causing extreme hardship, and the return of Victorian levels of  absolute poverty and inequality, affecting many UK citizens. Perhaps Clegg is hoping the public have forgotten that it was the Coalition that lost us the Moody and Fitch triple  A credit ratings, and not Labour.

And in light of yesterday’s news concerning the foreign exchange fines, as banks were handed £2.6bn in penalties for market rigging, even George Osborne conceded that “Today we take tough action to clean up corruption by a few so that we have a financial system that works for everyone. It’s part of a long-term plan that is fixing what went wrong in Britain’s banks and our economy.”  The recession in 2007/8 was caused by a global banking crisis which began with the collapse  of Lehman Brothers, a sprawling global bank, in September 2008, which almost brought down the world’s financial system.

Brown steered us out of that recession by 2010, and the Tories, with their bogus austerity plan, designed to reward the wealthy with more wealth, taken from the poorest, and least able to shoulder the burden of the cuts, put us back into recession. Tories ALWAYS cause recessions, just like Thatcher and Major did.

Labour builds, the Tories always destroy.

A must read: Ed Miliband’s powerful speech 

An excellent summary of Ed Miliband’s values and views:  Here’s what I believe – “People sometimes say to me politicians are all the same. That couldn’t be further from the truth. So let me explain what I stand for, in the simplest terms”.

Ed Miliband is an excellent leader, and here’s why.

Thanks to Robert Livingstone

Doctors could ask for funding from the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) to ensure patients go back to work quickly, a top NHS England official has suggested, according to GP Online. Is this the next stage in Iain Duncan Smith’s war on the sick?

Addressing the annual conference of the out-of-hours provider body Urgent Health UK, Professor Keith Willett, national director for acute episodes of care, said getting a patient in to see a GP quickly and issued with a return to work certificate could save the government two weeks of benefits payments.Oh really? And what if the patient isn’t better by then?

He said: “So, in the same way as health has given social care the Better Care Fund, and said “come and help us out”, we could, arguably, go to work and pensions and say, ‘Excuse me, we can get them to go back to work seven days quicker. Can we have some of your money to be able to do that?’”

Correct me if I’m wrong, but the gentleman seems to be admitting that doctors are signing people off work who don’t need it – and suggesting that the DWP should bribe them into sending people back to work.

Why is he following an Iain Duncan Smith narrative that has not been proved?

Breaking news: Thirty MPs. and almost the entire nation demand that Cameron stands down. UKIP defectors say he’s not leadership quality, and can’t eat a chip butty without looking stupid, and Lynton Crosby blames Labour…

Odd, isn’t it, that the media didn’t declare that Cameron’s leadership is in crisis, recently, with the two high profile UKIP defections.

Rumour-mongering in the media, paraded as newsworthy headlines, about “discontent” over Miliband’s leadership is based almost entirely on two cowardly backbenchers – who have curiously chosen to remain anonymous and thus remain conveniently unquotable – grumbling about Miliband.

Welcome to the new era of media-amplified political campaigning Crosby-style: the politics of spite.

Not only is this malicious approach meant to be potentially profoundly damaging to Miliband, but to candidates and of course, to the millions of people that are suffering enormously under the current regime, who desperately need a Labour government. It’s an attempt to divide the party and its supporters. But isn’t that what the Tories always do?

I wonder if the positive comments about Miliband and the support from Labour shadow minsters will make it into the mainstream media, after all, these far outnumber the comments of a pair of anonymous backstabbers. I somehow doubt it.

Tristram Hunt, the shadow education secretary, said Miliband was on course to become an “innovative, reforming, radical” prime minister.

Miliband is being so viciously but insubstantially attacked, and on such a superficial level, precisely because he is the most left-wing leader of the Labour party for decades.

The right-wing and their lackeys in the media are engaged in an all out propaganda war. Firstly they right know that Ed Miliband has edited their script, abandoning the free-market fundamentalist consensus established by Thatcherism in favour of social democracy. Secondly, the right-wing media barons who set the terms of what is deemed politically palatable in Britain have never forgiven Ed Miliband for his endorsement of Leveson, which they believe is an unacceptable threat to their power. Thirdly, they know Labour under Ed Miliband is set to win the 2015 election.

Socialism for a Sceptical Age, by Ralph Miliband was about the continued relevance of socialism in a post-communist world. Ed Miliband has said that the final few sentences of this book are his favourites of all his father’s work:

“In all the countries there are people in numbers large and small who are moved by the vision of a new social order in which democracy, egalitarianism and co-operation – the essential values of socialism – would be the prevailing values of social organization. It is in the growth of their numbers and in the success of their struggles that lies the best hope for mankind.”  

“Socialism is not a rigid economic doctrine, but ‘a set of values’ It is ‘a tale that never ends’. Indeed, the strange fact is that  while there’s capitalism, there’ll be socialism, because there is always a response to injustice.” Ed  Miliband. (Source – The moment Ed Miliband said he’ll bring socialism back to Downing Street .)

This provides a good insight into what Miliband is all about.

And he’s right.

Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, and Andy Burnham, the shadow health secretary, said the speculation in the Times was a lie.

Andy Burnham told Sky News: “The stories in today’s newspapers are complete and pure fiction. There is not a shred of truth in them.

What I think it’s part of is a deliberate and desperate attempt to destabilise the Labour party and to divide us. But I can say this: it won’t work. We are a united team, we are united behind Ed.”

Rachel Reeves said: “A Labour government will make a huge difference to the lives of millions of people. But we’ll only get one if we stay united behind Ed Miliband.”

Chuka Umunna, the shadow business secertary, hailed Miliband for taking Labour to within “touching distance” of government. In his blog on the PoliticsHome website he wrote: “We have a leader who has kept us united and overseen the renewal which so eluded us at the end of our time in government. Ed is an honest, sincere man of deep beliefs, and these are just some of the reasons why I backed his campaign to become leader. In an era of extreme scepticism about politics, these are not qualities most people attribute to politicians. What is too often not remarked upon is that these are qualities which people – even our political opponents – attribute to Ed.”

I agree entirely. Miliband is consistently honest and has shown integrity. And another one of Miliband’s greatest virtues is that he re-humanises politics. For him, people’s individual experiences matter, and he always cites many examples throughout his speeches. He includes qualitative accounts from real people. It’s a particularly contrasting quality to Cameron’s unempathic, dehumanising, quantitative, scapegoating, and negative labelling approach.

As I have previously said, the Tories always strive to foster divisions, or the illusion of them. One of their approaches has been to perpetuate an impression that MPs are “allthesame”.  This  myth came straight from Tory HQ.

BBC’s Tory correspondent Nick Robinson admitted live on air that Cameron’s best chance of winning the next election is if people believe politicians are “all the same”. But that is very clearly not the case. I think one major ploy has been to use propaganda based on an exclusively class-based identity politics aimed at the “working class”: an approach that UKIP have most overtly tried to adopt. The Tories are more about subterfuge and covert propaganda.

Identity politics purposefully excludes other social groups and also sets them against each other, for example, working class unemployed attacking migrants – it’s really is divisive, anti-democratic, and quite deliberately flies in the face of Labour’s equality and diversity principles. That’s the problem with identity politics: it tends to enhance a further sense of social segregation, and it isn’t remotely inclusive.

Of course it also enhances the myth of “out of touch”/ “allthesame”. It’s a clever strategy, because it attacks Labour’s equality and inclusive principles – the very reason why the Labour movement happened in the first place – and places restriction on who ought to be ‘included’. Think of that divisive strategy 1) in terms of equality. 2) in terms of appealing to the electorate 3) in terms of policy. Note how it imposes limits and is reductive.

Only a year ago, even the Torygraph stated that Ed Miliband is proving himself to be a brave and adroit leader. If Mr Miliband is remembered for nothing else, his stand on Syria changed the course of history. The Murdoch media empire, propagandarising for the US-led wars of the last two decades, is now isolated in its obsessive screeching for military action, and the fact that MPs ignored the bellicose pro-“intervention” editorials in Murdoch papers is a clear indication as to just how much they are declining in influence.

Benefits sanctions are financial penalties that are given to people who are deemed to have not met the conditions for claiming benefits. The social security system has always been based on people meeting certain conditions – this has  been true for all working-age benefit claimants, with sanctions applicable to those who fail to observe those conditions. This has been the case since its inception.

However, the Coalition changed the conditions and increased the application, duration and severity of sanctions that apply to those claiming Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) and extended the application of sanctions to those in the Work Related Activity Group of those claiming Employment and Support Allowance (ESA). Since 2012, benefit payments can be suspended for a minimum of four weeks and for up to three years where a person “fails to take sufficient steps to search for work”, to “prepare themselves for the labour market” or where they turn down an offer of employment or leave a job voluntarily.

It emerged during an ongoing inquiry instigated by the parliamentary Work and Pensions Select Committee that Research conducted by Professor David Stuckler shows that more than 500,000 Job Seekers Allowance (JSA) claimants have disappeared from unemployment statistics, without finding work, since the sanctions regime was toughened in October, 2012.

This means that in August 2014, the claimant count – which is used to gauge unemployment – is likely to be very much higher than the 970,000 figure that the government is claiming, if those who have been sanctioned are included.

The research finding confirms what many of us already knew.

Professor Stuckler, who has analysed data from 375 local authorities, said: “The data clearly show that many people are not leaving Job Seekers Allowance for work but appear to be being pushed off in unprecedented numbers in association with sanctions.”

The Work and Pensions Committee decided to conduct a further in depth inquiry into benefit sanctions policy, following the findings of the research. This inquiry will consider aspects of sanctions policy which were outside the remit of the Oakley Review. (You can see the terms of reference for the inquiry, and submissions are invited, all details of which are here – Committee launch inquiry into benefit sanctions.)

Labour MP, Debbie Abrahams, said: “Sanctions are being applied unfairly to job-seekers, as well as the sick and disabled.

The reason the Government is doing this is that it gets them off the JSA claimant figures, so it looks like there are fewer people unemployed.”

The Government claims that sanctioned claimants who leave the benefit system are going into work – they also claim that their punitive sanctions regime “works”. But the Oxford study found this is untrue in a “majority” of cases.

Debbie Abrahams asked the Tory Minister Iain Duncan Smith how many people were excluded from unemployment figures after being sanctioned but not going into work.

In the angry exchange, during the Work and Pensions Committee questions session yesterday, Mr Duncan Smith said that Ms Abrahams’ claims were “ludicrous”.

Mrs Abraham said: “Hundreds of thousands of people have had their benefits stopped for a minimum of four weeks and then approximately a quarter of these people, from the research that I’ve seen, are disappearing.

They are leaving and we don’t know where they are going. That’s an absolute indictment of this policy and it’s a little bit worrying if we’re trying to tout this internationally as a real success story.”

Mr Duncan Smith responded: “Well I don’t agree with any of that. I actually believe the sanctions regime as applied is fair, we always get the odd case of …”

The MP for Oldham East and Saddleworth cut in and said : “People have died after being sanctioned, Minister.”

“No, I don’t agree with that,” Mr Duncan Smith answered. But he has yet to provide any evidence that supports his view.

Many of us have been calling for an inquiry following the death of  former soldier David Clapson. He died starving after being sanctioned for missing a single Job Centre meeting. David had type one diabetes, which is an autoimmune illness. He was unable to afford to maintain an electricity supply to keep his fridge running, where he safely stored his life-saving insulin. Sadly David is not an isolated case, and this government have been presented with many other cases of extreme hardship and suffering because of sanctions, which they simply deny.

Of course a DWP spokesman dismissed the study, saying: “It looks to be partially based on unreliable data.”

I don’t see how that could be the case. The data presented in the study explictly relates to people vanishing from the DWP’s records after claiming Job Seekers Allowance, who are not in work, so the comment from the DWP isn’t even a coherent, rational response.

We do know that the real problem is not people that people aren’t trying hard enough to work, or failing to try,  but rather, it is the Tories ideological obsession with austerity policies that contract the economy and fail to provide the job opportunities that people are desperately looking for. And the fact that the government are lying to hide the consequences of their damaging and extremely cruel policies.Those policies are ultimately about removing support from people that need it, as part of a broader ideological aim of dismantling welfare provision.

Since the government does not track or follow up the destination of all those leaving the benefit system, as discussed, the off-flow figures will inevitably include many having their claim ended for reasons other than securing employment, including sanctions, awaiting mandatory review, appeal, death, hospitalisation, imprisonment, on a government “training scheme” (see consent.me.uk  and the Telegraph – those on workfare are counted as employed by the Labour Force Survey.)

And it’s clear that sanctions, which are a crudely applied politicised form of punitive behaviourist pseudo-psychology, are being used to prop up an insidious ideological drive to remove people’s basic lifeline support at a time when they need it.  Sanctions are the removal of money that the state previously deemed necessary for meeting basic needs, and as such, cannot possibly be justified when all they may ever achieve is to force people to focus on basic survival rather than on gaining employment.

Many thanks to Robert Livingstone for the excellent pictures.

Related

A letter of complaint to Andrew Dilnot regarding Coalition lies about employment statistics

Punishing Poverty: A review of benefits sanctions and their impacts on clients and claimants

Rising ESA sanctions: punishing the vulnerable for being vulnerable

Over the past four years, the government has scapegoated people who need to claim benefits by blaming them for their circumstances, which are actually because of Tory-led economic policies. This is a government that is ideologically opposed to welfare provision of any kind, and we have already seen the steady dismantling of our post- war settlement, which was agreed by the main political parties at the time, and comprised of a mixed economy, a free public sector, free healthcare and education, a guaranteed state pension, social welfare provision and access to legal aid.

There was a political consensus that this was the basis for a healthy society. The provisions under the post-war settlement, together with our observation of human rights, have been the solid basis of our democratic society, until recently.

To justify their ideology, and their draconian policies, the government have used a propaganda campaign that has vilified benefit claimants, and portrayed them as a “burden on the taxpayer.” Of course we know that most people needing welfare have also paid tax, and aren’t a discrete group at all. Indeed, the poorest pay a proportionally higher percentage of tax in this country. And the government have form for telling big lies.

Thanks to the Tory-led government propaganda machine, we have a society that deems it acceptable that wealthy people don’t pay taxes, and when faced with the prospect of contributing to a society that they have taken so much from, it’s considered the norm that they complain and threaten to move abroad.

When poor people lose money, they become homeless, starve and die. That is also becoming a norm.

George Osborne has promised to send a letter out to tax payers every year, telling us where our money is being spent. The problem is that it’s just another part of the Tory propaganda campaign to portray our welfare system as a “burden on tax payers”, in order to justify  disassembling it completely. So Osborne has lied, by conflating public sector pensions with welfare, but by splitting state pensions – the bulk of our welfare bill – from the standard and established category of “welfare spending”, amongst other things. This has been done this to make the welfare budget look bigger than it actually is.

George Osborne’s grossly misleading summary

.

This is from Richard Murphy, from Tax Research UK, which gives us an accurate picture of government spending.

The TUC say that the Treasury’s breakdown of how tax revenue is spent by government is a political stunt, the costs of which should be repaid to taxpayers.

The tax breakdown given in tax statements has been criticised by the Institute for Fiscal Studies for labelling a quarter of all spending “welfare”. The Institute says that this includes areas such as public service pensions and social care, whereas only 14 per cent of public spending is on working-age benefits – and much of this is spent on people in work.

TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady said: “The Conservatives have been caught blue-handed using tax payers’ money for party political campaigning. They should now be made to pay the full costs of this stunt.”

The tax breakdown given in tax statements has been criticised by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (ILF) for claiming that  a quarter of all spending “welfare”. The Institute says that this includes areas such as public service pensions and social care, however,  only 14 per cent of public spending is on working-age benefits – and much of this is spent on people in work.

The government has started to send out information on how tax revenue is spent to individuals who pay income tax or National Insurance contributions. It has broken down spending into a number of categories. The biggest of these is “welfare”, which represents a quarter of total spending. State pensions also appear as a separate category, accounting for 12% of spending. In this observation we look at what counts as pension and welfare spending, and offer some alternative breakdowns.

Spending on state pensions is straightforward. This is essentially just the annual spend on the basic state pension and earnings-related state pensions from various different schemes.

“Welfare” spending, at 25% of the total, is taken directly from the government’s public expenditure statistical analyses. It is the total spending defined as “social protection” in these analyses, less spending on state pensions. Total spending on social protection comes in at £251 billion in 2013-14, which is about 37% of total public spending of £686 billion (before accounting adjustments). Take off £83 billion of spending on state pensions and you get to £168 billion on “welfare” – very nearly a quarter of total spending.

What is included in that “welfare” total?

It includes £28.5 billion on “personal social services”. This is a number that in many analyses one would want to report separately from other welfare spending. It includes spending on a range of things, such as looked-after children and long term care for the elderly, the sick and disabled. Unlike other elements of “social protection” it is not a cash transfer payment and in many ways has more in common with spending on health than spending on social security benefits.

Another £20 billion of the spending counted under welfare is pensions to older people other than state pensions. That includes spending on public service pensions – to retired nurses, soldiers and so on [1]. This is not spending that would normally be classed as “welfare”. The rest of the pay package of a public sector worker is included as departmental spending within the department of that worker. One could either report such pension payments separately or, like pay, as part of the relevant spending function. The pay of nurses counts as health spending. One could count their pensions in the same way.

That leaves around £120 billion of other welfare spending, which can be broken down in a number of different ways.

Since the government has chosen to report state pension spending separately, one obvious division would be to separate spending on those of working age and those of pension age. In addition to state pensions a further £28 billion is spent on pensioners, of which £15 billion goes on benefits specifically for that group, such as pension credit, attendance allowance and winter fuel payment, while the remaining £13 billion is largely spent on housing benefit and disability living allowance. So of the £205 billion or so spent on tax credits and social security benefits about £111 billion is spent on those over pension age and £94 billion on those of working age.

Figure 1 and Table 1 show this breakdown of the 25% of total spending described as “welfare” by the government, alongside the 12% spent on state pensions. 4% goes on “personal social services”, 3% on public service pensions, 4% on other benefits for pensioners, and the remaining 14% on benefits for those of working age.

Figure 1. Breakdown of “welfare” as a share of total spending

Sources: Public Expenditure Statistical Analyses, Department for Work and Pensions benefit expenditure tables.

Table 1. Breakdown of “welfare” as a share of total spending

Sources: see Figure 1.

It could of course be argued that this would provide too much detail. But there are five categories reported in the government’s breakdown of spending, each representing less than 2 percent of total spending. If it is worth reporting contributions to the EU budget which represent less than 0.1 percent of total spending then there might be a case for providing this additional breakdown of “welfare spending”.

There are of course other ways of breaking down spending on social security benefits. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR)  for example, show spending on the elderly, sick and disabled, families with children, the unemployed and help with housing costs (table 2.1 here)

In our survey of the benefits system we provide a similar split (table 3.1 here), separating out spending according to its function as best we can. There are clearly different judgments one can make here (we include attendance allowance in spending aimed at the sick and disabled, rather than the elderly for example), but it does give a good sense of the overall spending priorities within the system. Table 2 shows this split, including the 12 percent of total spending going on state pensions, and excluding the 4 percent spent on personal social services and the 3 percent reported as going on pensions other than the state pension (both of which the government includes in “welfare”).

Table 2. Welfare spending by function

Note: categories correspond to the primary recipient of a given benefit, rather than capturing all of the expenditure on each group.

Source: Department for Work and Pensions benefit expenditure tables.

There are different ways of reporting how our taxes are spent, and there is a balance to be struck between the amount of detail presented and clarity of message. Lumping a quarter of total spending into one bucket labelled “welfare” may not strike the most helpful balance, especially when it includes such diverse items as spending on social care, public service pensions, disability benefits, child benefit and unemployment benefits.

Note: The IFS provides detailed breakdowns of tax revenue here, benefit spending here, and other public service spending here.

[1] It is also not the number reported by the OBR when looking at spending on public service pensions (see table 4.24 here). The OBR reports gross spending of £36 billion and “net” spending – i.e. gross spending less contributions received – of £10.5 billion. But for the purposes of this note we stick with the numbers published in PESA.

Image: http://www.kayamarart.com

Related

REVEALED: The Government will use its new tax summaries to MISLEAD THE PUBLIC about welfare spending

The OBR shows why welfare cuts won’t control spending

The personal tax statement George Osborne doesn’t want you to see

Tax leaflet or Targetted Anti Welfare Propoganda?

Please sign the petition from Mike Sivier: Withdraw the new ‘Annual Tax Summary’ and apologise for misleading the public

Council houses, already in limited supply, are being sold off on the cheap to people who immediately rent them back to housing benefit tenants, according to an Independent investigation that exposes a new “Right to Buy” scandal.

Cameron launched a revamped version of Right to Buy in 2012, giving new preferential terms. He increased the cap on the maximum discount to £75,000 (or £100,000 for London). This means a quadrupling of the discount in London and a trebling for most parts of Britain.

Now the Independent has uncovered evidence that the Government’s drive to encourage councils to sell off their already limited supplies of housing stock is allowing former council tenants to profiteer as buy-to-let landlords.

Margaret Thatcher coerced local authorities who were strapped for cash in the 1980s to sell their properties at a cut price, and the Tory Government’s latest  initiative to encourage councils to sell off their remaining stock of houses is having a disastrous effect because it allows social housing, intended to house those people in most need of housing, to be exploited for personal profit. The policy, introduced in 1980, gave generous discounts for council tenants to buy their own home. More than two million homes were sold under Right to Buy between 1980 and 1995.

Local authorities, already facing massive funding cuts,  now have to pay much more to place vulnerable families in properties that were once council-owned. At least 32 councils now rent or pay out housing benefit to tenants living in homes sold since the Government revamped the Right to Buy scheme in 2012, Freedom of Information requests show.

There are rules to deter the immediate sale of properties bought under Right to Buy but renting is unregulated, so the Government’s hefty discounts on sales have turned former council tenants into buy-to-let landlords overnight. Council leaders have branded the situation a national scandal.

In April 2012, David Cameron increased the cap on the maximum discount to £75,000, or £100,000 for London. In the borough of Haringey 396 homes have been sold under Right to Buy since April 2012; of those, 28 are already being rented out to people on housing benefit at a cost of more than £265,000 a year to the public purse.

And of course the real costs of the Tory Right To Buy scheme are shouldered by those in greatest need of accommodation, who are forced to rent from the increasingly unaffordable private sector, whilst private landlords rake in profits. This means that people are forced to cut their spending on essentials like food and heating, or uproot and move away from community, jobs, schools and families.

There are currently five million people on housing waiting lists. The lack of affordable council and social housing has become even more acute due to the Government slashing the budget for building new social housing by 60%, soon after gaining office.

This Government’s housing policies are creating misery for thousands of families.